European Blues
FRANK KEATING
Treats all round next week if the secondleg matches in football’s Champions League are as compelling as the first. Chelsea and Rangers, each playing in Spain, are at serious risk of elimination, but Liverpool and Arsenal should be in the hat for the quarterfinals. Liverpool, a goal down, may lack a front-line scorer but a coherent, fluent midfield and the importance of being earnest should ensure another heady night at Anfield and satisfactory progress in defence of the title they won so seismically last summer. Arsenal’s glistening win against pallid Real in Madrid might well have revived their entire winter. They simply can’t blow it now, surely. Chelsea and Rangers are in desperate need of more than press-conference optimism next week. Glasgow’s Blues have done royally to get so far; London’s Blues are not only up against a Barcelona side packed with assertion, style and swank, but themselves seem suddenly peaky and browned-off for all their out-of-sight lead in the Premiership. Chelsea’s Portuguese manager Mourinho has been the year’s backpage bill-topper. When Chelsea led last week soon after a clumsy defender was sent off before the break, there was something of the recklessly cavalier young Napoleon in Mourinho ordering further attacks instead of shutting shop and barricading the advantage. Barcelona would happily have settled on caution to eke out a possible draw, but once they twigged Mourinho’s cheek, they woke with a passion. It was terrific. If you include a couple of bang-to-rights penalty appeals, they could have won by six or seven. I can’t wait to watch again next week the 18-year-old Argentinian Messi, an entrancing talent bound for greatness: low-slung like his dazzling compatriot Maradona and with the straight-lined gundog sniff for goal of a Greaves or Law. For Germany’s midsummer World Cup, come to think of it, why are Brazil, England and the hosts runaway bookies’ favourites to win? Slap the mortgage on Argentina, pronto.
Or make it a double, with Arsenal for the Champions League. And why not? He who laughs last.... There you are, you Gooners, at least that prediction saves a lot of your virulent red ink. Every sportswriter knows that even the mildest criticism of Arsenal or their austere father-abbot, the pale and whingeing Wenger, draws a shoal of seething response from north London nutters. First time, proudly, I made Pseuds Corner 30 years ago was for ‘doubting if I could ever be buddies enough with an Arsenal fan to allow him to sleep on my bedsit floor’. Not always so. Last week I enjoyed a lunch with author Mike Hobbs, planning a book on sports’ memorabilia junkies. Good idea. He asked me the first three sports books I’d read. For cricket, I said, John Arlott’s From Hambledon to Lord’s, which I now see was published in 1948 so, in fact, it was 1946’s Wisden, lovingly sent to me at prep school by my Pa. For rugby, dispatched from Cork for my tenth birthday by Uncle Kearney (‘To Francis For a good year of straight running, low tackling, and a hatful of tries’) it was Rugger: Do It This Way, a picture coaching book featuring Irish pre-war great Mark Sugden. And for football I stole 1s 3d from my Ma’s purse to buy on Gloucester GWR station Arsenal’s Year, a catchpenny souvenir of their 1948 championship. So a childhood Gooner me. Or was it just because Denis Compton was a top Gunner then, and 19-year-old local cricket hero, darling Arthur Milton, was a Highbury reserve?
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